“Paysage Horizontal”

A landscape reduced to its structural essentials — fields, hillsides, terraces and trees dissolved into interlocking planes of colour, the whole composition assembled from angular, precisely bounded shapes that suggest the world rather than depicting it. André Lhote (1885–1962) called this process the reconciliation of Cubism with nature, and Paysage Horizontal is that reconciliation in full operation. The palette is extraordinary. Acid green, yellow, orange, amber, mauve, teal, coral — each plane a distinct, uninflected colour, placed against its neighbour with the intelligence of a painter who understood colour relationships as a system rather than a sensation. The jagged, lightning-bolt forms that cut through the centre of the composition — yellow against purple, teal against orange — create a visual energy that pulls the eye across the surface in rhythmic waves. There is nothing accidental here. Every edge, every colour choice, every angle is the result of a painter who had thought more carefully about the structure of painting than almost anyone else of his generation. Lhote was born in Bordeaux in 1885, trained as a sculptor in wood, and arrived in Paris in 1906 just as Fauvism was erupting at the Salon d'Automne. He passed through Fauvism quickly — too interested in structure for pure colour sensation — and by 1912 had joined the Section d'Or, the Cubist group that included Marcel Duchamp, Jean Metzinger and the poet Apollinaire. He went further than most of his contemporaries, founding the Académie Montparnasse in 1922, writing the foundational theoretical texts on Cubist landscape and figure painting, and becoming the most influential art teacher in France of the twentieth century. His students included Tamara de Lempicka, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diego Rivera. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1954, received the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1956, and was given a major retrospective at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1958. His work is held in the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Tate in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.